Sitting at one of Richmond’s busiest intersections, on the edge of Virginia Commonwealth University’s downtown campus, Steven Holl’s massing of oblique cuboids into a 3,800-square-metre modern-art institute creates a new link between city and school. The shape is a metaphor for “forking time” and potential new directions in contemporary art. The faceted volumes, which incorporate […]

Local is a funhouse installation in a central square in Mexico City. The designer, Antonio Morodo of the Mexican firm MRD Arquitectos, created a circular edifice made of wooden studs and sheets of plywood. Visitors enter through one of a dozen doors whose colours match the 12 major subway lines in town. They then find […]

When the University of Porto invited Xavier Monteys, a Spanish professor of architectural design, to give a lecture in town, they told him to choose his own venue. The topic of Monteys’s class – a collection of Le Corbusier drawings of Mallorca, intended to be seen in the round – was perfectly suited to one […]

KnitCandela, a sculptural pavilion at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, is named after Félix Candela, the Spanish and Mexican architect who used thin concrete shells in his many iconic buildings. Candela created his shells by layering wet concrete atop bulky wooden formwork. But Philippe Block – a co-director of the Zurich-based Block […]

This proposal by Studio VAARO and Gabriel Fain Architects was submitted to the international competition for the Barilla pavilion at the pasta manufacturer’s headquarters in Pedrignano, Italy. The Toronto-based architects designed a 15,000-square-metre visitors centre as an integral part of the landscape by tucking the building into a hillside and covering it with a green […]

The first phase of this Warsaw museum extension, which is to be built in two stages, involves the construction of a three-storey polyhedral building with an arthropod-like roof and a prickly exposed-concrete facade. Standing on the foundations of an 1836 prison building that was used by the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation of Poland, the […]

An abandoned neo-brutalist skeleton gets a new life in São Paulo, its sixties-era exposed-concrete frame having been judged too foreboding. Instead, the architects reclad the 17-storey, 9,444-square-metre one-time residential tower in business casual and converted it into an office building. The new interior’s sparse material palette of wood and glass, its clean lines and its […]

In a complete break from the traditional, book-centric typology, a team led by Amsterdam’s Civic Architects converted a 1932 locomotive hangar in the city of Tilburg into a 21st-century library: a mixed-use and multi-functional venue that’s inclusive and curatorial rather than hush-hush and archival. Although there may still be quiet nooks for reading in the […]

To furnish such disparate spaces as waiting rooms, staff rooms and public or private meeting areas, you need an adaptable furniture system. Enter designer Ichiro Iwasaki of Tokyo-based Iwasaki Design Studio, whose Kiik system, an unusually versatile furniture collection, aims to give buyers as many options as possible. To that end, Kiik tables come in […]

The Sincretismo collection, by EWE Studio of Mexico City, brings pre-Columbian traditions into the contemporary home. Each piece is a sculptural object. The Partera stool, a sturdy U-shaped seat on a shell-like base, is carved from a single chunk of wood or stone. The Partera chair, made of burnt wood, is modelled on a Mexican […]